Currently, several business financial management systems are available to help a business perform various business financial management functions such as, but not limited to, invoicing and accounts receivable management, expense and bill payment management, customer management, payroll management, inventory management, and tax preparation.
Typically a business financial management system's ability to perform and automate as much of the various business financial management functions, and business related financial transactions, is of most interest/value to the business/user.
However, while many financial transactions involving individual consumers do generate mostly electronic financial transaction data, many financial transactions in a business setting still rely on the use of paper checks. Currently, these check-based transactions are largely excluded from automated processing using currently available business financial management systems because while currently available business financial management systems are quite capable of processing electronic data representing business related financial transactions, the printed, or hard-copy, data presented on a paper check is not readily processed by currently available business related financial management systems.
As a result, currently, the data related to a check-based financial transaction, such as payee, payment amount, date, etc., must be manually entered into the financial management systems and then the processing of the check-based payments to correlate and credit the check-based payments to customer accounts and/or outstanding invoices must once again be handled in a largely manual manner.
Consequently, currently, a user must first manually obtain the check, or, at best, an image of the check. Then the user must visually examine the check, or image of the check, to determine the transactional information associated with the check, such as the party submitting the check as payment, i.e., the payor, and the amount of the check. Then the user must manually make the correlation between the check and the specific invoice and/or customer account. Then the user must access the customer account associated with the determined payor, and/or any specific invoice for which the check-based payment was tendered. Finally, the user must make a payment entry in the financial management system indicating the received payment, and often enter various check data such as the check number, date, and amount.
Clearly the current process described above for processing check-based payments to the business and correlating and crediting the check-based payments to customer accounts and/or outstanding invoices is a labor intensive process that can consume significant business resources and time. This is particularly evident when it is considered that most businesses routinely receive significant numbers of check-based payments from multiple customers for multiple invoices.
What is needed is an efficient and largely automated process for correlating check-based payments with the customer accounts and/or invoices to which the check-based payments should be applied and making payment entries within a business financial management system.